The present invention generally relates to integrated multiple data editors and, more particularly, to a super block structure containing two or more diverse object sets positioned so that the object sets overlap one another, reside side-by-side, or extend above or below one another. The object sets may be text, graphics or tables, and once created, the super block structure is treated as an object set in the formatting of a document thereby simplifying the formatting algorithm of the editor.
Computers are coming into more common use throughout society not only because computers can perform many jobs more efficiently than prior devices or methods, but because the relative cost of computers has decreased dramatically over the past decade. At first, mainframes and then microcomputers with multiple terminals made access to computers available to many people in larger businesses. With the advent of microcomputers for both business and personal use, great numbers of people now have access to computers. The trend is for most computer users not to be computer professionals or sophisticated in data processing techniques. It has therefore been necessary to design what have come to be known in the art as user friendly computer programs to allow the unsophisticated user to perform desired tasks on a computer without extensive training. One technique that has been employed is to provide the user with a menu of choices of the particular tasks or functions which may be performed. Such a menu may take the form of a full or partial screen display with spaces adjacent the menu entries where the cursor may be placed by the use of keys on a keyboard or other cursor moving device. A selection of the desired task or function is made by placing the cursor in the spaced adjacent that entry and pressing the ENTER key or other key provided for that purpose. The program may be provided with a series of menus so that the user is led through progressively more complex tasks or functions in a simple and unconfusing process. Such programs are generally described as menu driven programs as distinguished from command driven programs. In the latter case, the tasks or functions to be performed by the user must be chosen and entered by a series of commands. This type of program is typical of earlier types of programs and requires some degree of sophistication and training of the user.
In addition to making programs more user friendly, the recent trend has been to provide some form of integration of computer program applications. Without integration, the user must employ separate application programs for, say, word processing, data processing, and graphing, and it is often difficult to merge the outputs of the several applications in a single document. Therefore, the purpose of program application integration is to further simplify the use of a computer to produce a desired output product. Software integration has evolved in several forms. Perhaps the simplest form of integration is a series of application programs designed to work alike sharing the same files and using the same or similar commands to perform the same or similar functions. This form of integration is relatively easy to implement but does not allow the individual programs of the family to be run simultaneously. Currently, the most popular integrated software are what may be termed multiple-function programs. These are characterized as incorporating a variety of applications within one program. Such programs generally allow splitting of the screen into several different windows almost as if each were a separate program. Typically, these multiple-function programs include text, spreadsheet and business graphing applications. Somewhat similar to the multiple-function programs is the now evolving integration technique based on a database application environment wherein all applications share a common set of data. Quite a different approach is taken when an integrated operating environment is provided. In this approach, individual programs can share information and often appear on the screen at the same time, each in its own window. Applications can be chosen and combined in contrast to multiple-function programs that are limited to applications programmed into the package.
Integrated operating environments are best implemented in object-oriented systems. This is a relatively new approach in that software systems have traditionally had two components: data and procedures. The data represents the information manipulated by the software and the procedures represent a unit of the software. Actions occur when a procedure is invoked and is given some data to manipulate. The problem with this traditional approach is that the data and the procedure are treated as if they are independent when in fact they are really related. In contrast, there is only one component in an object-oriented system, i.e. the object which represents both the information and the manipulation of this information. A programmer using an object-oriented system sends a message to invoke a manipulation, instead of calling a procedure. The message includes a symbolic name which describes the manipulation but not the manipulation details. The object receiving the message determines which method to execute on the basis of the message selector. The most thorough investigation of the object-oriented approach has been done by the Xerox Learning Research Group in Palo Alto, Calif., which designed and implemented Smalltalk, a language very similar to the process of human interaction. A Smalltalk programmer implements a system by describing messages to be sent and describing what happens when messages are received.
Smalltalk has been particularly advantageous in the development of software for the user of personal computers with a high-resolution display, a keyboard, a pointing device such as a mouse, and a disk storage and processor unit. A pointing cursor is used to track the current screen mouse position and allows the user to point to any displayed object. Usually, the mouse has one or more buttons, one being used for object selection and another being used for menu presentation. Such a machine was designed and developed by Xerox to facilitate the research and development by Smalltalk. This machine is the Alto computer, and several machines were donated by Xerox to Stanford and Carnegie-Mellon Universities and the Massachusets Institute of Technology to be used for research projects. The Alto was never commercially produced.
Early in 1981, Xerox introduced the 8010 Star Information Systems, a personal computer patterned after the Alto computer for use in offices by business professionals. The Star is a multifunction system which combines document creation with data processing, electronic filing, mailing and printing. As in the Alto, an important component of the Star computer is an all points addressable (APA) or bit-mapped display screen which makes visual communications more effective by allowing full graphics flexibility. The approach in designing the Star computer was to first establish the fundamental concepts of how the user would relate to the system and then design the software and hardware specifications. The design of the Star user interface was based on a familiar user's conceptual model, seeing/pointing as opposed to remembering/typing, what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG), a set of universal commands, consistency, simplicity, a modeless interaction and user tailorability. There are icons on the display which represent office objects, such as documents, folders, file drawers, in-baskets, and out-baskets. The icons can be "opened" to enable the user to deal with the object the icon represents. Documents can be read, the contents of folders can be inspected and mail can be examined. Everything to be dealt with by the user and all actions available to the user have a visible representation on the screen so that the user never has to remember the different meanings and contexts of any key. The mechanism used to make these concepts visible is the property and option sheets. A property sheet presents all the possible options for a particular object such as, for example, type font and size, bold, italic, underline and superscript/subscript on a text character property sheet. To select any of these options, the user merely selects the option by pointing and pressing the appropriate button, and then to change any property on the property sheet, the user points to it and presses the appropriate button again. To prevent the user from being ovewhelmed with information, property sheets display only the properties relevant to the type of object currently selected thereby hiding complexity until it is needed. The Star computer also allows the system to be tailored to fit the individual user's needs. The user can tailor the working environment by choosing the icons for the desktop display. Blank documents can be set up with text, paragraph and page layout defaults. The filing system can be tailored by changing the sort order in file drawers and folders.
Early in 1983, Apple Computer introduced a new kind of computer called the Lisa. Lisa's designers drew heavily on the previous work done by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, but they also refined several borrowed concepts and combined them with many new ideas. The first task tackled by Lisa's designers was to devise a new way for users to interact with the computer. The result was an internal "User Interface Standards" document that describes how a user interacts with the Lisa system. Like the Star computer, the desktop manager for the Lisa is an icon base, but unlike the Star where the icons can be put at fixed locations on the screen so that they can never overlap, the Lisa icons can be placed anywhere. For that reason, the Lisa computer can have overlapping, arbitrarily shaped objects on the display screen. The Lisa computer depends on the metaphor that the video display is a desktop, while the icons are objects on the desktop. Everything in the Lisa system is represented on the desktop by either an icon or a rectangular area referred to as a window. All icons can be selected via the mouse, and all windows can be scrolled horizontally or vertically, expanded or contracted, and moved by holding down the mouse booth and moving the cursor. The design of the Lisa system is integrated. Each of the Lisa programs has a large amount of common behavior and structure. There are no modes to restrict the user's activities at a given time. For example, the user can switch from text to spreadsheet to graphing applications just as if those applications were separate sheets of paper on the desk. Like the Xerox Alto and Star computers, the Lisa computer is based on the Smalltalk Language/operating system. The technology developed for the Lisa computer has been further refined in the recently introduced Macintosh and Lisa II computers from Apple Computer.
As part of a research effort at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in Cambridge, Mass., to develop software techniques in the field of office systems, Sheldon Borkin and John Prager developed the personal on-line integrated text editor (POLITE). This is an easy-to-use, real-time editor and formatter for compound documents. A compound document is one containing images, draw graphics, charts, handwriting, text, tables and mathematical symbols. The philosophy of Polite is the idea that an editor should be able to handle integration of function in-line without having to invoke separate applications and without using a cut and paste buffer. The Apple Lisa and Macintosh and the Xerox Star computers are all integrated systems offering the capability to edit compound documents, but the method commonly used in those computers is to place the result of the requested function in a cut buffer and then return to the document editor to paste the result in the desired location. This is a time-consuming and tedious process. However, the inspiration for Polite was drawn from the research done at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, and the concepts of the Polite Editor are similar to those developed for the Smalltalk programming language and further refined by the Star and Lisa computers. Since Polite is intended to have a very wide audience, the human factors of the system have been carefully considered. Some of the ease-of-use features of the system include unlimited UNDO and REDO functions, real-time formatting, use of menus, a pointing-based help system, multiple window editing, and tutorial "help-by-example". In Polite, there is no distinction between source document and formatted document. There is only one form of a document in existence, and it is always formatted and it is always printable. Thus, whenever the user makes a change, the document is automatically reformatted thereby providing immediate feedback to the user and eliminating much of the guesswork that characterizes prior editors. The user sees a portion of the document on the screen along with a small menu identifying the current programmed function key definitions. On the function keys are requests (commands) which are either immediately executable or which act as a "gateway" to further menus. In these other menus, some of the function keys have other, i.e. local, definitions. The Polite system consists of two major functional components: the screen-manager and the document-manager. The document-manager contains Polite's internal representation of the document (both text and formatting information), while the screen-manager contains the displayable form of the document (the only form the user ever sees) and controls the interaction with the user. The screen-manager maintains a display-oriented WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) represenation of some subset of the document. This subset includes at least that portion of the document which fits on the screen, and possibly the whole document depending on the document size.